The Way the Books I Read Speak to Each Other

It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for the next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. … When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passion with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind: and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

In the context of the book, mothers’ orderliness is not entirely desirable, as the suggestion of invasive tampering here suggests. It is something against which to struggle, and, as Maria Tatar writes in Enchanted Hunters, Peter offers the Darling children an escape and liberates “their minds to roam freely in the world of imagination.”

Of course, sleep is not very interesting to children. But, oh! what a soothing image of Mother putting things straight at the end of the day. I wish someone would pack up my ugly rumpled thoughts and put them at the bottom of my drawers for me.

The image of the tidied mental drawers stuck with me, then I read this in Tove Jansson’s Fair Play:

Jonna had the happy ability to wake up every morning as if to a new life, opening before her clean and unspent right through to evening, rarely shadowed by yesterday’s worries and mistakes. (Fair Play, 3)

And I thought of Mrs. Darling, flying through her window and off up to Sweden to do nocturnal housekeeping there while her own children were away.